December 06, 2012

Here's an article by Saree Makdisi on the implications of Bibi's decision to further colonise the West Bank, separating north from south and the whole thing from Jerusalem. It appears in the International Herald Tribune which is the "global edition of the New York Times". This is just a snippet:

Once the fiction of a separate Palestinian state is revealed to have no more substance than the Wizard of Oz — which the E1 plan will all but guarantee — those Palestinians who have not already done so will commit themselves to the only viable alternative: a one-state solution, in which the idea of an exclusively Jewish state and an exclusively Palestinian one will yield to what was really all along the preferable alternative, a single democratic and secular state in all of historical Palestine that both peoples will have to share as equal citizens.

A campaign for rights and equality in a single state is a project toward which the Palestinians will now be able to turn with the formidable international support they have already developed at both the diplomatic and the grassroots levels, including a global boycott and sanctions movement whose bite Israel has already felt.

For Palestinians, in any case, one state is infinitely preferable to two, for the simple reason that no version of the two-state solution that has ever been proposed has meaningfully sought to address the rights of more than the minority of Palestinians who actually live in the territory on which that state is supposed to exist.

Things have been changing quickly lately. Israel was left isolated at the UN over the Palestinian UN bid and it had to settle for unfavourable terms over its recent lost war in Gaza. I'm guessing things haven't changed so much for Saree Makdisi's article to appear in the New York edition of the New York Times but I could be wrong.